Before SpaceX’s Starship lost control and exploded over the Indian Ocean during its ninth test flight, the 400-foot-tall megarocket blasted off from Texas’s newest city .

Starbase, situated on 1.5 square miles of the Lone Star State’s southernmost tip in the Rio Grande Valley, is mostly made up of SpaceX employees living on company-owned property and abuts a habitat for endangered wildlife, as well as a public beach.

Starbase serves as the main testing and launch location for Starship , SpaceX’s planned fully reusable spacecraft, which is meant to revolutionize human and uncrewed space travel with its gargantuan payload capacity and rapid-fire flight cadence. If Starship’s development proceeds as planned, the megarocket could soon be ferrying crew and cargo alike to multiple othe

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